ColinB
The financial cost of the atomic energy program in the period 1946 to 1952 was £104.7 million (mostly concealed in the budget statements) and there was a major re-direction of supplies, construction materials, building personnel, key scientists and technicians to build Harwell, Risley, Calder Hall, Aldermaston, Windscale and Dounreay. This investment was made at a time when the country really needed to apply all of its resources in re-building a war-torn and ravaged country.
1. Neither Harwell nor Dounreay were a part of the atomic bomb programme.
2. Dounreay didn't begin construction until 1955, after the first bombs were delivered.
3. The cost was but a tiny fraction of the national wealth. A far greater proportion was consumed by the V-bomber programme, and we rarely hear objections raised to the cost of these.
4. Unlike today, there was a national consensus that the money should be spent. People had just emerged from two damaging wars with 50 million dead. These weapons were regarded honestly as the guarantors of a hard-won peace. The casualties of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were seen as a necessary price for peace and stability. I don't recollect any crocodile tears then, and CND was more than ten years into the future. My own mum was not untypical. Aged 16 at the end of the Great War, half of the young men she knew from school were dead, and then twenty years later her generation had it all to do again in WW2. Can a modern 16-year-old girl even begin to comprehend the sadness that never left her. No surprise then that her generation and mine said "NEVER AGAIN", and the atom bomb was seen as a gift from God. Even our friends at the Guardian supported it, urging the UK government to build ballistic missiles as well as V-bombers. Strange bedfellows some will say. But that is as it was then. The present is not the same country. And those who held those views have nothing to apologise for. It's down to their efforts that we can spend our time in these pursuits. Its not for several generations removed to second-guess their choices. IMHO.